#2 Canon: The Crumbling Facility
Originally posted here on November 6, 2021.
Finally getting around to this prompt. I needed a few days to collect my thoughts, especially after Goratrix wrote his monster of a response to it.
For all the people just joining us--hi, I'm Research. I'm fictionkind, and my lone fictotype is Gordon Freeman from Half-Life. Anyone familiar with the game probably just cringed thinking about the levels of exotrauma I've got. I'll get into that on a different post, but for now, let's talk about what's the same and what's different from canon. Warnings for mentions of violence, mind control, gore, and death, but nothing graphic or too bad.
The most important thing to know, regarding me and canon, is that events follow the remake Black Mesa more closely than they do the original Half-Life. Black Mesa is a pretty faithful remake of the original, but a few of the worst moments and chapters (On A Rail, all of Xen, parts of Residue Processing I think...) have been redone and made into overall a much better, more polished game. There are also moments of characterization and humanization throughout, overall making Black Mesa a much more immersive experience that kicked off me figuring out that I'm fictionkind (which I discussed in my response to prompt #1.)
With that out of the way, here's a quick rundown of canon: I show up late to work in the Anomalous Materials lab in the Black Mesa Research Facility. I get into my Hazardous Environment Suit and run a non-standard test on a non-standard specimen. This accidentally kicks off something called a Resonance Cascade, which basically opens portals to an alien dimension that teleport in hostile aliens that start destroying the facility. It becomes my job to try to get to the surface to get help to stop this mess. Long story short, that doesn't go the way we want, and the military shows up on its own... to cover up the aliens teleporting in, not to help, and they start mowing down scientists. A convoluted series of events happens, with the crisis getting worse and worse and hundreds, if not thousands, of people dying, until the scientists in the Lambda Complex inform me that a) they knew about Xen, this alternate world/dimension, the borderworld for awhile and had been going there, and b) that this isn't gonna end unless I go there and kill some big nasty alien that's causing most of these portals to open up and making the invasion continue. Obviously, I go, and I have to fight my way through an alien world and kill the thing.
In canon, I do this alone. I get occasional help from science personnel in the facility. But for me.... that's not true. I picked up a group. They went with me. I did everything I could to protect them, and they helped, even the scientists who had never held a gun before. I held spare pistols to give to the people who chose not to come with us, to give them some way to protect themselves. Maybe a military guy even joined us at one point--my noemata aren't that clear.
But I know I lost them all, one by one, until I was alone. Until that last run to the Lambda Complex, where I had failed everyone so far and I wasn't going to do it again. I was going to get there and clean up this mess. People helped me, accompanied me, when they could, but they usually died pretty quickly after that. There came a point where I would sign aggressively for them to not come with me; I was the main target. I was only putting them in further danger. Some didn't understand--I was mute, they couldn't understand ASL--and others pretended not to. They wanted to help, and I couldn't protect them. I wasn't good enough.
That's why, when one brave soul offered to come into Xen with me, I wouldn't let them. I couldn't. I couldn't take someone on a potentially one-way trip to an unknown alien world where we would probably die. It was my choice to go alone, and I'm glad I did.
The vortigaunts... in Xen, there was tons of hostile wildlife and hostile sentient aliens following the Nihilanth, the creature in charge. The vortigaunts, though, were enslaved--they attacked me, scared out of their minds, while in the facility, but on Xen, once they learned that I wasn't going to hurt them, they wouldn't hurt me. They even helped me, sometimes--pointed in the way I needed to go, unplugged machines for me, occasionally activated teleporters when I needed them. We couldn't communicate at all--they spoke their own language, I was mute, the whole business, but we both understood that we were on the same side. They never helped me fight, but how could they? They were mind controlled and turned against me every time one of those damn Controllers would show up.
As for the Nihilanth... I don't remember it well. I had to kill it, and it was a terrifying fight, to be sure. In the aftermath, there was an explosion, a portal--and I ended up back in the facility, I think. I don't remember much of what happened after that, but the scientists congratulated me. They'd seen it all, fuck, they'd been sending me care packages of ammo and supplies from the facility this entire time, I knew that they had been, and I was so, so grateful, but we had to get the fuck out before the facility crumbled or the military blew it up.
That's not what happened in canon.
In canon, upon killing the Nihilanth, I'm plucked out of the timeline by the mysterious G-man, who gives me the "choice" of a job and basically puts me in stasis until the events of Half-Life 2... which I don't think happened at all for me. If they did, I don't remember. The game doesn't resonate with me at all like Black Mesa does. The G-man isn't familiar. The Combine mean nothing to me. I have other noemata from the aftermath.
Canon paints me as some solo hero with occasional help. Like I was so strong--I, a theoretical physicist who had never held a gun before--that I could save the facility and possibly the world myself. As fucking if. I was a terrified research associate with shaky hands and an HEV suit, a lot of help, and a lot of luck. I've got exotrauma out the ass and a lot of knowledge of what the insides of people look like. I never could have done that shit alone and holy fuck, I am so glad that I'm not a fictive. I think that would just... make it too present, too real. I'm terrified to pick up more noemata out of fear of what I'll remember, but other times I remember something nice, like jamming out with air guitar at my desk weeks prior to the incident with my good pal Barney.
Other than events, though, there's not much to fuck up about Gordon Freeman. The games never give us much of an idea of his personality, so there isn't really anything to contradict on my end. My only protest is when fans don't write him as mute, but like... that's not canon, and I'm learning to get over it.
At some point, I want to sit down and write a big long account of everything I remember, in order, and try to get it all out of my head and onto "paper," so to speak, but that's not tonight. That'll be a hellishly long bit of writing, and I might tap into the creative writing degree that Tanix is getting to write it with a little more... fictional flair. I don't know yet. But that's my rundown with how accurate canon is, and I'll see you guys next prompt or ramble.